Why didn’t he do more?

Our opinion: Revered football coach Joe Paterno is fired over a sexual abuse scandal. Why can’t the legal standard, for him and others like him, be so much higher?

If only this were merely about football. Or about ham-handed communications and bureaucratic bungling at some far-off university. Instead, it involves one of the most grotesque crimes imaginable — the sexual abuse of children — and the breach of trust and power that keeps those crimes from being properly investigated.

Coach Joe Paterno was fired Wednesday by Penn State. That might well make the elder statesman of college football, until last week revered across Pennsylvania and beyond it, the most prominent casualty of a sexual abuse scandal since Cardinal Bernard Law resigned in Boston in 2002.

Pedophilia, in all its ugliness and all its tragedy, has again captured the public’s rapt attention. And it’s because someone in a position of such unquestioned authority didn’t take it seriously enough.

It does little for Mr. Paterno’s reputation, and far less for the apparent victims of his one-time heir apparent Jerry Sandusky, that he seems to have satisfied his legal obligation by reporting the alleged rape of a young boy at the Penn State football complex in 2002 to his boss, then-athletic director Tim Curley — who resigned and was indicted this week.

The law is clearly inadequate. In Pennsylvania, it is the responsibility of “the person in charge of the school or institution” to contact child welfare authorities in cases like this one. That absolves Mr. Paterno too readily.

Even in New York, where what are known as mandatory reporting laws still aren’t rigorous enough, someone in Mr. Paterno’s position would have been required to go to the police.

Then, of course, there’s the moral obligation of Mr. Paterno and anyone else in a position like his, however uncomfortable it might be. At Penn State, the roster of enablers, as detailed by legal authorities, extends from the once-distinguished coach to all-but-anonymous university employees.

One apparent victim’s anguish led to another’s, Pennsylvania authorities say, both before Mr. Paterno became aware of the allegations against Mr. Sandusky and after he did.

“Nothing happened. Nothing stopped,” says state police commissioner Frank Noonan, even after Mr. Sandusky first acknowledged to campus police in 1998 that he had engaged in improper behavior with young boys in the shower room.

Finally, with Mr. Sandusky facing a 40-count criminal indictment that could land him in prison for seven years, the rest of us can take stock of the latest sordid case of the most innocent people imaginable allegedly brutalized by people they trusted.

For Mr. Paterno, that means something sadly close to banishment.

“This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life,” he said in a statement released Wednesday. “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

If that’s not a piercing cry for a society more vigilant about the sexual abuse of minors, complete with stronger reporting laws, nothing is.

6 Responses

I feel sick that four adults were aware of the act witnessed by another coach and no one acted. Why does it take laws for people to do what is right? Any one of those men could have called the police and no one did. And the student riots? The fact that they are more upset that he won’t finish out the season than that he allowed sexual abuse to occur is sickening.

I really can’t understand why Jopa let this issue go without further action on his part. Some questions that come to mind, did he ever confront Jerry Sandusky with the report he had? If so I would like to know what Sandusky said. I imagine because all the people involved, the AD, the Pres and everyone else are pleading innocent, hopefully we’ll find out about that. The comparison is made here with the Cardinal Law case in Boston. I would hope the outcome for these guys is quite different, you’ll recall the Cardinal wound up in Rome with a new job and cushy apartment, that’s not exactly my idea of justice. Maybe there is no real justice in some cases especially if it’s trumped by power and money.

If a man came to me saying he witnessed Sandusky raping a 10 year old in the shower YESTERDAY; I would believe that man had already told authorities. And so it is with Joe Paterno. His next move is to alert administration so they can handle it. This is nothing more than a knee jerk witch hunt.

The real culprit here is the Criminal Justice system; they had Sandusky in 1997 and let him go on the promise he wouldn’t do it again.

Couldn’t disagree with you more. Joe Paterno did exactly what he was supposed to do when hearing about an alleged act of a former employee second-hand…you tell your supervisor. You don’t call the police if you didn’t witness a crime, and you don’t take legal matters into your own hands when you work for the university. What if the allegations turned out not to be true? You’re going to risk ruining someone’s life over something you didn’t witness. If you need a little background on what happens to people falsely accused of sex crimes, Google Wenatchee, Wash., and have a good read. By not letting Paterno finish out the season, the trustees have created more long-term ill-will toward the university…exactly the thing they wanted to avoid.